Money Talks

For the past 17 years, the off-Broadway company Working Theatre has been producing works by illustrious playwrights like Israel Horovitz and Suzan-Lori Parks that, in the words of its mission statement, "explore the lives of working people and the issues they confront in an increasingly complex world" (theworkingtheater.org). The company possesses a tireless social conscience and is friendly with organized labor, going so far as to teach theater workshops and offer discounted tickets to union members.

The Working Theatre's shows are typically job-specific. In last year's Hold Please, tensions flared between the old school typist-secretaries and the up-and-coming, miniskirted PowerPoint whizzes. Rob Ackerman's runaway 1999 hit, Tabletop, looked at the stress-filled environment of a TV-commercial film studio.

In a departure, the company opens this season with the far more general Abundance (www.abundanceproject.net/), a meditation on Americans' often fraught relationship with money. The play, which runs at Manhattan's Dance Theater Workshop through Jan. 24, is the culmination of a four-year project by Marty Pottenger, the respected playwright and performer who previously provided the company with City Water Tunnel #3 , an acclaimed solo piece about the construction of one of the largest public-works projects in American history.

In the course of her research, the ever-thorough Pottenger interviewed more than 60 people (half millionaires, half minimum-wage workers) and hosted workshops around the country in which participants (more than 600 to date) discussed their finances in a group-therapy-like setting. Pottenger wrote about 85 percent of the script and took the rest directly from those interviews and workshops.

In the course of her research, Pottenger discovered that millionaires and minimum-wage workers had plenty in common. "They both spent time thinking about money and they both wished it would go better for everyone," she explained, "and neither had a place in their lives where they could have important conversations about money." In Pottenger's view, the key to improving the gross inequities that exist between the haves and have-nots is "ending the silence and the taboo" that surround things like credit-card debt, essentials versus nonessentials and charity.

"Human beings get smarter by telling their stories," she says. So in the interest of making the country smarter about money, she solicited individuals' "money stories," as she calls them, by asking questions like, "What's your earliest memory about money?" In reply, she heard many "lovely and different" tales, ranging from "taking a dime from the church collection plates to getting an allowance to finding a dollar."

Abundance covers a vast amount of ground. No official position is taken on any of the subjects raised, but one leaves with the sense that Pottenger approves of the estate tax and disapproves of designer clothes and Americans' $95 million-a-day lottery-ticket habit. References logged in the course of the play run the gamut from manifest destiny to child labor, slavery to SUVs. Pottenger says her goal was not to solve any problems but to "live the question, as [poet Rainer Maria] Rilke said," and to get a discussion started. "We have to start talking about this . . . it's basic math," Pottenger says. "And theater is the perfect place to be addressing this."

While the playwright may be forgiven for not solving all of the country's financial and social problems in the course of the 100- minute, intermission-free show, from a theatrical point of view it's hard not to find the production painfully earnest. And the endless parade of U.S. census statistics (many of which are indeed jarring) make portions of the show resemble NBC's "The More You Know" public-service announcements.

Ultimately, there's something oddly patronizing about the consciousness-raising groups that give the show its structure. To purge themselves of their financial shackles, one woman cuts up her Prada sweater while another offers the guttural cry, "Hopelessness, I divorce you!" repeating it three times à la Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain. (This character later delivers a rousing, intermittently coherent sermon to the audience about how we're all in this together.)

Pottenger seems to think substantial gains are going to be made by the character with four mortgaged houses and $75,000 in credit-card debt bonding with the Mexican immigrant character making $100 a week. Yet one wonders if talking about money in such theoretical, abstract terms isn't less helpful than asking specific, concrete questions like, "How about unionizing Wal-Mart?"

Ada Calhoun is a freelance writer and Theater Listings Editor at New York Magazine.